I was re-installing my Minisforum MS-01 recently as all the stuff I’d been testing on it meant it wasn’t really setup any more how I liked it. Anyway, one of the handy tips I’ve obtained from who knows where is a way to backup all of your device drivers before re-installing, helping to avoid the missing drivers thing in Device Manager.
It’s pretty easy too. All you need do is:
-> Create a directory for all your drivers ‘C:\WindowsDrivers’ for example.
-> Use this command:
—-> dism /online /export-driver /destination:”C:\WindowsDrivers”
This will then go and export all your drivers for you. You can see the process and the output below.
If you look in the directory, you’ll now see all your drivers.
Copy that directory off somewhere else, and you have a copy of all your drivers.
Now, when you go to re-install the machine, if any drivers are missing you can point Device Manager back to that directory or from a USB stick. In my example below, you can see that my device driver for my network card is missing (this example is from a Windows machine running on Parallels Desktop):
You can right click on that ‘Ethernet Controller’ and select ‘Update Driver’ – and from the screen that’s presented, select ‘Browse my computer for drivers’:
What you want to do now is select the folder where you have those exported drivers – or a USB of course. Make sure ‘Include subfolders’ is selected that way you don’t have to find the right specific directory. Then click ‘Next’.
What you should see now is that the process has located the driver and installed it for you.
Now, if we look back in Device Manager, we should see the triangle/exclamation error has now gone.
Quite a handy thing that. I backup my drivers ever so often on my machines really to avoid having to hunt around for things. Anyway, you can also see a video run through here:
Leave a Reply